"Human Nature"

I've long had problems with "human nature" as a meaningful explanation for anything. Just now I came across this passage in John Dewey's 1939 Freedom and Culture:

[T]he shift that has occurred from time to time in theories that have gained currency about the "ruling motive" in human nature suggests a question which is seldom asked. It is the question whether these psychologies have not in fact taken the cart to be the horse. Have they not gathered their notion as to the ruling element in human nature from observation of tendencies that are marked in contemporary collective life, and then bunched these tendencies together in some alleged psychological "force" as their cause? It is significant that human nature was taken to be strongly moved by an inherent love of freedom at the time when there was a struggle for representative government; that the motive of self-interest appeared when conditions in England enlarged the role of money, because of new methods of industrial production that the growth of organized philanthropic activities brought sympathy into the psychological picture, and that events today are readily converted into love of power as the mainspring of human action.

In any case, the idea of culture that has been made familiar by the work of anthropological students points to the conclusion that whatever are the native constituents of human nature, the culture of a period and group is the determining influence in their arrangement; it is that which determines the patterns of behavior that mark out the activities of any group, family, clan, people, sect, faction, class. It is at least as true that the state of culture determines the order and arrangement of native tendencies as that human nature produces any particular set or system of social phenomena so as to obtain satisfaction for itself. The problem is to find out the way in which the elements of a culture interact with each other and the way in which the elements of human nature are caused to interact with one another under conditions set by their interaction with the existing environment. For example, if our American culture is largely a pecuniary culture, it is not because the original or innate structure of human nature tends of itself to obtaining pecuniary profit. It is rather that a certain complex culture stimulates, promotes and consolidates native tendencies so as to produce a certain pattern of desires and purposes. If we take all the communities, peoples, classes, tribes and nations that ever existed, we may be sure that since human nature in its native constitution is the relative constant, it cannot be appealed to, in isolation, to account for the multitude of diversities presented by different forms of association.

All sf writers take this view, right?

The James Tiptree Jr. Award

Today in the US, working folk face the deadline for filing personal federal tax returns. It's worth reflecting that this is a tax paid largely by middle-class and poor people that chiefly flows into the pockets of defense and military contractors and those who lend money to the government to finance its economy-busting, never-ending War.

On another front, the 2007 Tiptree jury has announced that Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army has won the Tiptree Award. The Honor List (which seems to have replaced the short list) has also been announced:


* "Dangerous Space" by Kelley Eskridge, in the author’s collection Dangerous Space (Aqueduct Press, 2007)
* Water Logic by Laurie Marks (Small Beer Press, 2007)
* Empress of Mijak and The Riven Kingdom by Karen Miller (HarperCollins, Australia, 2007)
* The Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu (Hyperion, 2007)
* Interfictions, edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss (Interstitial Arts Foundation/Small Beer Press, 2007)
* Glasshouse by Charles Stross (Ace, 2006)
* The Margarets by Sheri S. Tepper (Harper Collins 2007)
* Y: The Last Man, written by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Pia Guerra (available in 60 issues or 10 volumes from DC/Vertigo Comics, 2002-2008)
* Flora Segunda by Ysabeau Wilce (Harcourt, 2007)

From the press release, posted on juror Gwenda Bond's blog:

Each year, a panel of five jurors selects the Tiptree Award winners and compiles an Honor List of other works that they find interesting, relevant to the award, and worthy of note. The 2007 jurors were Charlie Anders, Gwenda Bond (chair), Meghan McCarron, Geoff Ryman, and Sheree Renee Thomas.

The Carhullan Army elicited strong praise from the jurors. Gwenda Bond said, “Hall does so many things well in this book – writing female aggression in a believable way, dealing with real bodies in a way that makes sense, and getting right to the heart of the contradictions that violence brings out in people, but particularly in women in ways we still don't see explored that often. I found the writing entrancing and exactly what it needed to be for the story; lean, but well-turned.” Geoff Ryman said, “It faces up to our current grim future (something too few SF novels have done) and seems to go harder and darker into war, violence, and revolution.” Meghan McCarron said, “I found the book to be subtle and ambiguous in terms of its portrayal of the Army, and its utopia….The book became, ultimately, an examination of what it means to attain physical, violent power as defined by a male-dominated world. And it asserted that it could be claimed by anyone, regardless of physical sex, provided they were willing to pay the price.”

The book, which is Hall’s third novel, also won the 2007 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for the best work of literature (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama) from Britain or the Commonwealth written by an author of 35 or under.

Victoria Hoyle's review of this book piqued my interest, but it wasn't available in the US at the time. I gather it will soon (or may even now) be available in the US under a different title, Daughters of the North. Colin Greenland also reviewed it, here.

Of the titles on the short list, I've so far read only three (but will soon, of course, be remedying that):

--The Stross novel is curiously old to be on this list for a mainstream book. My lengthy, comprehensive review of it is still available at Strange Horizons.

--Interfictions is an interesting mixed-bag anthology (that has little to do with gender exploration). My favorite story in it is Vandana Singh's "Hunger," which I highly recommend.

--Much has been written about "Dangerous Space." You can find excerpts of and links to many of the reviews here and purchase it here.

Why Publish With an Independent or Small Press?

Tuesday evening I'll be participating on a panel at Hugo House, in Seattle, as a part of its InPrint series. Judging by the publicity material, I'll be in very fine company. Here's the scoop:

The Hugo House InPrint Series presents:

Why Publish With an Independent or Small Press?

An Evening with Northwest Independent Press Publishers

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008, 7:00 – 9:00



Richard Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave. Seattle
Admission $3 members/$5 non-members

Why Publish With an Independent or Small Press?


The Northwest features a handful of excellent independent press publishers who are producing interesting work and attracting positive critical attention and awards.

Tonight editors and publishers from several publishers will be on hand to explain the advantages of publishing with an independent small press and how to go about it. Our speakers will cover the editing and business side of small press, from queries and pitches to editorial preferences and distribution.

Small press publishers can serve audiences that aren’t normally served by larger publishers who can only publish very commercial work, allowing them to get away from publishing only work that appeals to the largest common denominator of readers. Once books have been published and received positive reviews, they often attract the attention of larger publishers for broader distribution. All of your questions will be answered and you’ll come away with valuable information and contacts for publishing.


OUR PANEL:

Black Heron Press: Jerry Gold, publisher and editor-in-chief Black Heron Press is one of the oldest literary presses in the Pacific Northwest. It specializes in literary fiction. Its books have been reviewed in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Stranger, Booklist, Publishers Weekly and other newspapers and journals. Several books it has published have won national or regional awards. Black Heron Press leans toward books that make a philosophical or moral statement, as well as being well-written. Sinc e 1996, it has given the Black Heron Press Award for Social Fiction.



Chin Music Press: Bruce Rutledge, journalist and author - Chin Music Press resurrects some of the best practices of publishing in past centuries in books that tell decidedly modern stories. As a reporter and writer living in Japan during the 1990s, Rutledge was struck at how US news media was devoting less and less space to international news. Chin Music Press was founded to catch those fascinating and insightful stories about our world that were being ignored by an increasingly myopic and profit-driven media.


Copper Canyon Press: Copper Canyon Press is a nonprofit publisher that believes poetry is vital to language and living. Since 1972, the Press has published poetry exclusively and has established an international reputation for its commitment to authors, editorial acumen, and dedication to the poetry audience. Copper Canyon has published more than 300 titles, including works by Nobel Laureates Pablo Neruda, Odysseas Elytis, Octavio Paz, Vincente Aleixandre, and Rabindranath Tagore.


Fantagraphics: Eric Reynolds, editor - Fantagraphics authors have garnered more favorable press attention than any publisher’s in the history of the medium of graphic novels and comics. Recent books alone have received significant, positive coverage in TIME, Newsweek, Entertainment Weekly, Spin, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Nation, and others. Fantagraphics was ranked among the top five most influential publishers in the history of comics in a recent p oll by an industry trade newspaper; it was the only independent publisher on the list, and the only contemporary publisher named alongside corporate behemoths Marvel and DC.

Aqueduct Press: L. Timmel Duchamp, author, publisher and editor – Aqueduct Press dedicates itself to publishing challenging, feminist science fiction that stretches the imagination and stimulates thought. Acqueduct Press authors include award-winning British authors Gwyneth Jones and Nicola Griffith, as well
as Northwest authors Ursula K. Le Guin, Nisi Shawl, and Kelley Eskridge.

Payseur and Schmidt: Jacob McMurray, publisher - Payseur and Schmidt resides in the lacunae between art and genre, producing literary-based art projects with ridiculous packaging. The Payseur & Schmidt stable of awesomeness includes works from Thomas M. Disch, Nicola Griffith, Art Chantry, John Clute, and Marvin Bell. www.payseurandschmidt.com


Wood Works Press: Paul Hunter, publisher and editor - Recently featured on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, Paul Hunter has published fine letterpress poetry under the imprint of Wood Works for the past 14 years, currently including 24 books and 55 broadsides. The press seeks to offer the best in contemporary poetry and poetry in translation, in an attractive, durable, inexpensive format. Three of his titles have been finalists for the Washington State and Colorado Book Awards.



The InPrint Series is a quarterly forum designed to connect writers with agents, publishers and publishing industry experts. The mission of Richard Hugo House is to build a vital learning community that develops and sustains practicing writers doing essential work. (206) 322-7030 www.hugohouse.org

Stuff to Check Out

I've had galleys coming out of my ears all week. I really wanted to play hooky yesterday, when Seattle had its first day of gentle-- even balmy-- weather in months; dutifully, I resisted. So no post, except for a few links:

--In Men Explain Thngs to Me, Rebecca Solnit begins with an anecdote of how Mr. Very Important, knowing she's recently published a book, proceeds to hold forth on a more important book on the subject that just came out (that turns out to be her own book, of course). "I like incidents of that sort, when forces that are usually so sneaky and hard to point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as, say, an anaconda that’s eaten a cow or an elephant turd on the carpet," Solnit writes. And she goes on to discuss "The Slippery Slope of Silencings" and characterizes credibility as a "basic survival tool" that women and others are still fighting to achieve.

Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.

I wouldn’t be surprised if part of the trajectory of American politics since 2001 was shaped by, say, the inability to hear Coleen Rowley, the FBI woman who issued those early warnings about al-Qaeda, and it was certainly shaped by a Bush administration to which you couldn’t tell anything, including that Iraq had no links to al-Qaeda and no WMDs, or that the war was not going to be a “cakewalk.” (Even male experts couldn’t penetrate the fortress of their smugness.)

Arrogance might have had something to do with the war, but this syndrome is a war that nearly every woman faces every day, a war within herself too, a belief in her superfluity, an invitation to silence, one from which a fairly nice career as a writer (with a lot of research and facts correctly deployed) has not entirely freed me. After all, there was a moment there when I was willing to let Mr. Important and his overweening confidence bowl over my more shaky certainty.


-- Angry Black Woman, who has been fighting off racist attacks, is calling for a Carnival of Allies:

This got me thinking about those white folks who exist in that liminal space where they are against racism but don’t understand how it works and get defensive, hurt, and freaked out when folks point out how they benefit from it without trying. We saw a lot of that on the Thank You thread before the others showed up. I am wondering how you turn that kind of person into an ally. I’m wondering if maybe I cannot simply because, when they read my words, they are so filled with defensiveness and perhaps guilt, nothing I say can get through. If they can’t listen to me, can they maybe listen to other White people?

And that got me wondering if this was true for any kind of ally. Is it easier to understand oppression, to move past guilt and on to useful dialogue, etc., if the person explaining these things to you in-depth is a person like yourself? White or male or straight or Christian or whatever? I don’t know. But as this is the Internet, it should be easy to figure out.

I call a Carnival. The Carnival of Allies. Where self-identified allies write to other people like themselves about why this or that oppression and prejudice is wrong. Why they are allies. Why the usual excuses are not good enough. I figure allies probably know full well all the many and various arguments people throw up to make prejudice and oppression okay. Things that someone on the other side of the fence may not hear. Address those things and more besides.

And when I say allies, I’m talking about any and every type. PoC can be (and should be) allies to other PoC, or to LGBTQ people if they are straight, or any number of other combinations. If you feel like you’re an ally and have something to say about that, you should submit to this carnival.


--And last week, Strange Horizons posted my review of Sarah Monette's The Bone Key.

Feminism and Appropriation

If you haven’t been following Delux Vivens' posts on the discussions as they've broken, She Who Has Hope has a roundup of the BrownFemiPower/Amanda Marcotte imbroglio*. Marcotte recently published a story on the institutionalization of sexual abuse of women immigrants in the U.S., without referencing or crediting the work women of color had been doing on these issues for years, particularly BrownFemiPower, a blogger Marcotte has acknowledged she reads regularly. There’s been a lot of blogosphere discussion, not all of which I’ve followed: I found ProblemChylde’s post linking Marcotte’s article to previous BFP posts especially instructive, and High on Rebellion’s Intellectual Theft Is Still Theft, discussing the ongoing problem of white feminists appropriating the work of women of color, painfully resonant with the discussion Pam Noles initiated over last Wiscon’s "But the Master Has A Black & Decker Cordless Power Drill" panel (on which I appeared).

Delux Vivens has also linked this to the ongoing Seal Press/BlackAmazon imbroglio, in itself just a single example of the divide between women of color and white women at the Women’s Action Media conference, which is in itself part of the long history of the contemporary feminist movement’s failure to acknowledge, include, or respect the work of women of color. The responses from all too many white feminists have been ... awkward.

*TM Witchqueen, with apologies for kvetching about the term before.

Seeing Voices: A Conversation with Nisi Shawl

by Jesse Vernon

Whether drawing upon the protective power of watermelon vines, the healing power of funk, or the pragmatic power of intelligent women, Nisi Shawl's collection of short fiction sparks the imagination. Her synesthetic descriptions elucidate an often psychedelic perception of the worlds therein. The tales in Filter House leap forward and backward through time and space, deftly weaving all-too-real topics like resource depletion, colonization, and racism within fantastical worlds of persuadable dragons, fickle gods, and interstellar travel. In true Seattle fashion, we discussed these stories and their inspiration over the din of an espresso machine.

^^^

This collection of stories is entitled Filter House. What exactly is a “filter house”?

I like ocean things, I like marine biology [and] I enjoy anything oceanic. I found this article about appendicularia and was reading about them and then looked at other articles on the web and found out about filter houses. They are so, so gorgeous. They are so beautiful. And I was just really attracted to the idea of something that was so ephemeral and beautiful.

So [a filter house] is sort of like an underwater, 3-D spiderweb that [appendicularia] use to trap food. They are filter feeders but they build these filters outside their body that last for about two or three hours, until the appendicularia outgrows it or they become clogged, useless. Then they release them and they drift down to the lower levels of the ocean. If you’ve read about anything in marine ecology, you’ve heard about “marine snow” – all the lower levels of life subsist on [it]; that’s the basic element of their ecology. So [discarded filter houses are] a large component of marine snow. [I liked] the idea that it was something so basic, too.

I wanted to have the title of the collection not be a story and I wanted it to be the sort of combination of words that would make people think, “Well, what is that?” I also was drawn by this idea that the structure of the short story collection is ephemeral, that it’s made up of other elements that are brought together in this moment – because they are so short, short stories are sort of ephemeral too.

I noticed the theme of water throughout different pieces in this collection, although they were written over a span of eight years. Bodies of water seem to hold significant power in your many of these stories.

[Water has] pretty much always been a passion of mine. I feel very watery – I know we’re all composed of 90% water or something – but I really feel like not just my body is made out of water. When I think about astrology, I’m a Scorpio: a water sign. I practice this West African religion called Ifá and in Ifá, one of the things is that different orishas are said to rule different people’s heads. You’ll be closer to or have an affinity for a particular orisha. And the one that I’m close to is called Olokun, [who] rules the bottom of the ocean.

So all of that benthic stuff really, really excites me…I love it – it’s water.

The stories in Filter House contain a huge breadth of narrative voices – not only within the collection but within each story as well. They range from rural African-American dialects to a philosopher princess in a medieval Muslim community to disembodied prisoners. Will you talk more about it’s like to make these shifts while you’re writing?

I’ve heard that there are people who write visually and people who write aurally. I hear everything – I hear the words. And so I hear those different voices – I hear the healer and I hear the aunt – and if I don’t hear them right, then I know I better not write them. ‘Cause they’ll be fake.

There is a lot of warmth in the relationships between your characters, especially the voices of children when they are narrating the stories. It feels like it captures something really familiar to me, even in stories that have nothing to do with my own history, or tradition, or culture, or spirituality…

I do write about children a lot. I use a child’s point of view quite frequently. Maybe it’s because you remember being a child. Some people forget that right away and I promised myself I would never forget what it was like to be little.

I told myself that too.

I think that some people really do forget. How can they live? [laughing]

In addition to writing stories, novels, and poetry, you also review books for the Seattle Times.

Yeah, I just turned in a review for a book called Incognegro that’s a graphic novel, a mystery. Oh, it’s wonderful. It was the first graphic novel I’ve ever reviewed…I’ve also reviewed some science fact, like Oliver Sacks and stuff like that. And some books from Africa. Sometimes if a science-fiction writer does something that’s not science-fiction, I’ll review it – like I reviewed Molly Gloss’ The Hearts of Horses which is a western and the last two William Gibson books; he’s not writing science fiction anymore.

So you’ve had extra opportunity to be reading lots of different books. Who has influenced you in terms of your writing and who are some of your all-time-favorite authors?

Well, as far as who I want to emulate, for a long time I’ve really been influenced by Colette. She’s a French writer. She was most popular in the 1920s, 1930s, up through 1950 – she had a good long run of a career. It’s very sensual writing; what I love about her writing is that there are no inanimate objects. They’re all characters.

[…]

I first got the idea that I could actually write science fiction and get other people to read it, besides my English teacher, from Suzy McKee Charnas. In the 1970s she came out with all this feminist science fiction. Particularly Motherlines – there’s a nuclear war and all the head honchos have their little hideaway in the Colorado mountains and then several hundred years later the story starts with the civilization that developed in the aftermath of that. It was a very harsh story but it was really beautiful and courageous – a story of this woman who was one of the slaves of the patriarchy that developed from these war survivors and how she tries to find a mythical land where women were in charge. So I read that and thought, whoa, so you can write this kind of stuff, and get away with it. [laughing] So, that was a big influence.

When I’m not reading for pay (with the Seattle Times), when I’m not reading for the science-fiction book club, which is another reading gig, or for my critique groups, I read Victorian literature. Because it’s so different than, first of all anything that I have to read for pay, and anything that’s going on now. The class consciousness is so different and so unconscious. And the attention to detail and the attitudes – it’s all sensawunda.

Hmm, that explains how you can capture so many different voices – that you're reading something that I don’t think a lot of sci-fi authors are reading.

They’re not reading the Trollope, they’re not reading the George Eliot, no.

Who else? Samuel Delany. I found him early on. And Jack Vance, still very pleasant to read. I’m not gonna just sound cool here, I’ll tell you the truth....

Let’s see. I read a lot of romances at one point. Regency romances. They’re the ones, where if it’s getting really racy, the couple will hold hands. [laughing] Georgette Heyer, in particular was one of those. She has this great, great wit. And again there’s a slang that they use in the Georgette Heyer novels. Those are set in regency period, you know, Jane Austen. She’ll have the slang of the young blades, then she’ll have the language of the older dames that are widows and dowagers and then she’ll often have the language of people who are called Bow Street Runners – this was before police forces, they were freelance detectives. And then criminal slang. So maybe that has some influence on the different voices.

I’ll tell you one more thing about different voices. Have you heard of the term code-switching?

Yes.

Okay, so from the beginning I was code-switching. I was raised in a house where the people I lived with spoke different voices. You would speak one voice when you were talking to someone at a barbecue and another one when you were at a PTA meeting. So, it’s like second nature, of course. I’ve carried it to such an extreme that one time I was taking orders over the phone at a natural foods warehouse – each person in the office had [their own] accounts and at one point, one of my favorite accounts said to me, about something that was suspicious that was happening with his order, he said, “There’s a nigger in the woodpile.” And I just never spoke to that person again. He had no idea who he was talking to, because I had been so good with the code-switching. So sometimes it’s a little harsh on me.

How do you feel like your personal experiences with or political ideas around power and oppression influence the way you tell your stories? For example, in one story in this collection, “Deep End,” prisoners are punished by being removed from their bodies and, in turn, given the bodies of their oppressors.

Well, that story, actually, was an invitation to write about colonization from a person-of-color’s point of view. So I was drawing on the idea that a lot of times places are settled by prisoners, [like] Australia. And then I thought, corporations only get worse (or better depending on your point of view) at what they do. So what’s one step further from sending you as a prisoner to do their dirty work of settling somewhere? The answer was, well, they don’t really need the body. Just commodify the mind.

My take on politics…a lot of people would consider me really apolitical. When I was very young, like five and six and seven, one of my earliest memories was actually being on a picket line and picketing a drug store because they wouldn’t hire black people. They were in a black neighborhood with all black customers, but they were all white. And I was out there marching on that. But when the World Trade Organization met here, I wasn’t protesting. I didn’t think that it would do any good, except make people that participated in it feel better, because they were doing something. But I didn’t see that it would change anything. So I think that I probably have a pretty cynical view. I think that actually the ways to change things are to do things that are not necessarily considered political. I do them consistently. So, hopefully, people can change things by changing themselves.

I vote all the time. I’ve been told all the time that voting doesn’t make any difference, but I know that people, that were my ancestors probably, fought for the right to vote. So, if someone was trying to keep them from doing it, then I’m going to do it. I think that the fact that I write at all, that I’m literate, is pretty political actually.

Is there anything else that readers should know about Filter House?

I want to say one more thing. This goes back to when I was little. When I was little I heard [the saying], “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” and I couldn’t understand that, because, one bird or two birds? Two birds are obviously worth more, plus you get this bush! Maybe it has berries on it and stuff. After someone finally explained it to me, I got the concept that having something in your hand is holding it and controlling it and that that is the boundary of yourself – your hand. But before that, no, the bush was mine too! And so what I want to give people is two birds and a bush.

^^^

You can purchase Filter House, which will be officially released in August, through Aqueduct's web site in early May. More information about Nisi Shawl can be found at her homepage.

Ursula K. Le Guin's Cheek by Jowl

I'm pleased to announce that Aqueduct Press will be publishing a new collection of essays by Ursula K. Le Guin, Cheek by Jowl, scheduled for release in March 2009. The collection's eight essays argue passionately for the necessity of fantasy in making and negotiating our world and refuse the ghettoization of both fantasy and "kid's lit" in favor of the supposedly more literary (and serious) realism.

[photo by Joyce Scrivner]

Just to give you a taste, here is the opening of the title essay, "Cheek by Jowl":

I am writing at a desk over which is pinned a painting from the Mexican state of Guerrero. It is in very bright colors of blue and red and orange and pink and green, and shows a village, drawn in the kind of perspective I understand -- no vanishing point. There are lots of flowers the size of trees, or trees the size of flowers. This village is busy: a lady is selling pies, men are carrying sacks, a young man is proposing to a young woman, a gentleman is playing the guitar and a lady is snubbing him, people are gardening, grinding corn, cooking, coming out of church, going to school; a cowboy on a horse is herding some cows and a bull, there is a cock-fight going on, a donkey pulls a cart into town, there are rabbits, chickens, and dogs in the house yards, at least I think they're dogs although they're rather hard to tell from the goats — or are they sheep? — next door, horses carrying loads are trotting down a street past the drunk man lying on his back kicking his heels in the air, there are fish in the stream, and up on the bright green hill under the bright golden sun stand two fine stags, one bright white and one bright red.

There are almost as many animals in the painting as people, and all of them are mixed up together, cheek by jowl, except for the wild stags, who stand aloof.

If you took the animals out of the picture it wouldn't be a true picture of the village, any more than if you took the people out of it, for the villagers' lives and the animals' lives are totally entwined. Food, drink, transportation, sport: the animals provide all that to the villagers, and therefore the villagers provide for the animals; each is at the service of the other. Interdependent. A community. Cheek by jowl. And this is the way most of us have lived during the several thousand years of human history, until just the last century or two.

The two stags, the only wild animals in the picture, stand outside the village, not part of it, yet very much part of the picture.

Before history, before agriculture, we lived for hundreds of thousands of years as hunter-gatherers. A hunter-gatherer village typically consisted of people only, with maybe some pets -- dogs or baby animals. Such a human community was an element in a predominately nonhuman community: forest, jungle, grassland, or desert, with its stable population of plants and animals, its ecosystem. Each species, including ours, was part of this population, this interdependent system. Each species went about its business on a more or less equal footing -- the tribal village, the ant hill, the antelope herd, the wolf pack. As hunter-gatherers, our relationship to the animals was not one of using, caretaking, ownership. We were among, not above. We were a link in the food chain. We hunted deer; lions hunted us. With the animals we didn't eat and that didn't eat us, our relationship was neutral or neighborly: some neighbors are tiresome, some are useful, or liked, or laughable, or admirable.

[...] The more we herded and bred animals for food and work, domesticating and dominating them, and the more we lived in cities among other humans only, the easier it was to separate ourselves from other species, to assert difference and dominance, denying kinship and its obligations. In Europe, the idea of community or neighborliness with animals became so rare that St Francis was considered strange and saintly merely for asserting it.

By the eighteenth century in Europe we'd invented "Nature." Nature comprises all the other species and all the places where they live and we don't. Idealised or demonised, Nature is humanity's Other. We stand outside it and above it.

In the forest, the village, or the farm, our interdependence with animals was unmistakable, community was a fact of life; we could despise our domestic animals, bully them, brutalise them, but we couldn't get on without them and we knew it, and so we knew them. But the cities kept growing and the farms and the wilderness shrinking. After the Industrial Revolution, more and more people lived without any daily contact with other species. In the twentieth century, when the Ford replaced the horse, the last animal to be of essential use in cities, it became possible to live a whole life indifferent to and ignorant of other species. The animals needful to us for food and other requirements are elsewhere, in distant batteries and ranches and slaughterhouses; our dependence on them is so well hidden that we can literally not know it. It takes an informed, active, and uncomfortable imagination even to connect a living pig or hen with the plastic-wrapped slab, the batter-fried lumps. The disconnection is radical, the alienation complete. With the evidence of continuity gone, the sense of community is gone. We have made a world for ourselves alone, in which nothing matters, nothing has meaningful existence, but us. There are no Others.

In this radically impoverished, single-species world, pets have become intensely important links to the nonhuman world. Watching the many animal shows on TV gives us the illusion of being in touch with that world. Birdwatching, fishing, hunting -- by now an entirely artificial hi-tech sport, but linked sentimentally to its origins: through all these we seek connection with nonhuman beings, or a reminder, however artificial, that there used to be a connection. That other people used to live here. That we had a family.

Our storytellers offer such a connection.

Canadian Commercial Seal Hunt: Largest Slaughter of Marine Mammals on Earth

The annual commercial seal hunt has begun in Canada. It is the largest mass slaughter of marine mammals on Earth. The number from last year was around 300,000.

In the first few days of this year's season, they have killed over 2000 seals. Apparently 95% of those killed are babies. They are killed for their fur, which ends up in fashion houses in Europe and Asia. Gucci and Versace are among the culprits.

Baby seals are often left on their own on the ice while their mothers go to feed. They are curious creatures who will approach a human who stands still. They are clubbed to death rather than shot, so as not to damage the valuable fur. The bloody carcasses are left on the ice. According to an independent panel of veterinary experts, who examined the carcasses in 2001, some of the baby seals did not show enough evidence of cranial injury to even guarantee unconsciousness – much less death – at the time of skinning.

I’m appalled and sickened by this. Most people here in the US I’ve talked to didn’t know it was still going on, and were horrified. Over 70% of Canadians are opposed to it as well. I learned all this from the Humane Society of the U.S., which has a petition and a list of suggestions as to what to do.

Public pressure apparently works, if slowly. According to the site, public pressure in Europe led to a strong statement from the European parliament. Although it fell short of a ban on seal products (such a ban on imports holds in the U.S.) it led to a drop in seal fur prices by 50%.

So it is important not to turn away in horror and try to forget about it. I haven’t been able to do so for days. Here is the site: http://protectseals.org.

Homo Sapiens indeed.

Thoughts on Feminism and SF

I apologize for the fact that the response below is dated; I began it in response to a February 29 post from Timmi DuChamp here: http://aqueductpress.blogspot.com/2008/02/myths-have-way-of-supplanting-history.html.

The post was with reference to an article in Foundation from August 2006, apparently favorably reviewing a book that is harsh on feminists in the SF field. I have not read this book and can only comment on feminism in American SF as a relative outsider (not being familiar with too much of Campbellian SF or American SF history) but with those qualifiers, here are some thoughts.

First, I understand that the argument goes as follows: in the past, women writers may have (wrongly) assumed that editors would not publish their fiction and that this perceived bias may have prevented them from submitting stories. But why blame the feminists for this, when a reading of golden age fiction (from anthologies in my case) makes it painfully obvious that women are either absent or limited to stereotypical roles in these stories? Does the author have any data to back this assertion? And even if it were true, what about the possible compensating effect that feminist SF writers have had in terms of providing inspiration to other women writers? In my personal experience (and acknowledging that an anecdote does not a scientifically credible conclusion make) I wouldn’t be writing science fiction and fantasy for publication if it hadn’t been for the feminists. I loved the genre as a kid but read mostly Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury, and as I grew older I felt distanced from it (it didn’t seem to have much to do with people of my race and gender, for one thing). When I came to the US I wanted to return to it because I loved the intellectual thrills I got from the genre, but I could not work through the distanced feeling until I discovered Ursula K. Le Guin. My brother and my husband had both read her for years and I finally read her in my early thirties, to discover with a shock of delight that someone had gone ahead and hacked a path through the jungle for people like me. And that is how I got started on writing SF.

It seems that if I can draw any conclusion from the excerpts in Timmi’s post, the reviewer is falling into a trap by accusing MacLean the way he does. Just because Campbell happened to support Merrill and MacLean does not automatically mean that he couldn’t possibly be biased against women’s writing. I went to a university in the southern U.S. for my Ph.D., where I met white people who were friendly to me, supported me in various ways, but they still held racist views. Perhaps overt racism is harder to find these days (as is, perhaps, overt bias against women) but there are still unconscious biases and institutional biases. I once talked with an SF editor, a woman I respect and admire, and said something to the effect that it was a pity there was not more fiction published by third world writers. The editor responded by saying that no, there was a lot of third world fiction published, and named a string of writers, all of whom were white Westerners. Somewhat surprised, I pointed out to her that I meant writers from the third world, and her response was as far as I could interpret it, an “oh, I hadn’t thought of that.” Here’s a perfectly nice woman who had apparently never thought that writing by third worlders would have value distinguishable from writing about the third world. It is not too hard to imagine an analogous blindness about women’s writing existing in the past.

And by the way here is an essay by Canadian critic and writer Claude Lalumiere, commenting on the dominance of Campbellian SF in American SF history: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/fearoffiction.htm.

Also of interest is this survey and statistical analysis of women’s writing in the new millenium (in the short fiction realm) by Susan Linville: http://www.strangehorizons.com/2007/20070820/0women-publish-a.shtml.

Her conclusion is that in our times there is no evidence for overt editorial bias --- the lack of women’s writing in the genre (for short fiction anyway) is because women submit a lot less than men. There are reasons for this that may be related to gender disparity. I wonder how many women writers of SF can relate to this great quote by Mary Turzillo in the article by Linville:

"Men writers frequently have to work two jobs, especially at the beginning of their careers: the day-job and the writing job (yes, it is a job!). Women work three jobs: the day-job (because most women with kids have a job outside the home), the evening job of taking care of the house and kids, and the evening job of writing. They may be able to get a few stories in print, but the time angle is crushing."

But missing from all this analysis is the nature of the stories submitted, and whether the ones published fit a certain mold that makes them recognizably and acceptably what people think of as SF. Is it easier for women who write within a certain dominant SF canon to have their stories published, than for women who are doing something truly transgressive with the genre? I can’t answer this question except anecdotally. But it is a point worth thinking about because --- who knows? --- there may be fair number of women writers for whom SF means something quite different than what it might mean for most men.

The Beauty of Dichroic Glass

I’d like to introduce readers of this blog (and the universe at large) to the fantastic glass art of my friend Michele Gutlove.

Michele works with dichroic glass, which utilizes the phenomenon of thin film interference to create shifting, iridescent colors, in a manner similar to colors on soap bubbles, or oil spills on the road on a rainy day. Glass itself is no ordinary substance, despite its ubiquity. It is solid, but shares some properties of certain special (supercooled) liquids. To Michele glass is a fluid in slow motion. Inspired by nature, her glass art captures motion, or the illusion of motion, in a manner that brings out this fluid aspect. Add to it the special properties of dichroic glass, in which the reflected rays and transmitted rays are complementary to each other, and her work becomes magical. View it at:
http://studiogh.com.

Miscellaneous thoughts: Arthur C.Clarke; The Trouble with Physics;

Here is my annual (or possibly biannual) post to this blog. I have a bunch of things to post about, all of which I have posted at once, after which I will be silent again for months. Such is life.

To begin, I’m saddened by the death of Arthur C. Clarke, who was one of the writers I read as a kid. Just reading the names of the books in his obituary brings back childhood memories: Rendezvous with Rama, The Fountains of Paradise, Childhood’s End. What I find most wonderful about his works (or my memory of them) is the grand scale of his ideas, the jaw-dropping sense of wonder that came through. He thought big --- and that applies just as well to his technological innovations (like the space elevator) as to his fiction. I think one of the first trips I ever took to Mars was via The Sands of Mars. I still remember how Childhood’s End pulled the rug out from under me. I read and devoured Asimov, too, in those days, and have some nostalgic fondness for those stories, but they did not move me like Clarke’s works did. Clarke’s vision was more humane, his writing more fluent and more passionate. Somehow I must have unconsciously assumed he would live forever, there on the jewel-like island of Sri Lanka, writing away and being the grand old man of SF for all of us space-bug-bitten carbon-based bipeds. Which is perhaps why his death was such a shock to me, even though I knew he was ninety, and frail. The night I heard the news I went out and looked at the stars.

Science fiction, by the way, was a major reason I went into science. For that and more, thank you, Sir Arthur.

Here is a link to an article about Arthur C. Clarke, published in New Scientist in December, 2007. http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg19626321.800-arthur-c-clarke-still-looking-at-the-stars.html.

I plan now to re-read his works and see if my older self likes them just as much as the child I was did.

*

In my copious spare time (hah!) I recently finished reading a book called The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin. It is a critique of the current crisis in theoretical physics, which according to the author (a physicist at the Perimeter Institute in Canada) is a result of everyone jumping on the string theory bandwagon. String theory, despite its mathematical beauty and its great success in unifying the fundamental forces of nature (if at the cost of extra dimensions), has not brought us one experimentally verifiable prediction in 30 years. It is apparently widely believed that there is no other game in town but string theory, and Smolin debunks that by presenting five other approaches by various groups that are at least equally promising, if not more so. Unfortunately because physics is no less immune to fashions and fads as any other endeavor, people working on alternate approaches are not given as much prestige (including jobs and funding and air time) as the string theorists, although ironically this was the very situation faced by string theorists when they first started out.

One of the interesting points that Smolin makes is that one reason why we haven’t had a theoretical physics revolution since the early twentieth century (when quantum physics and relativity took us by storm) is because we’ve stopped asking philosophical questions about the nature of reality. Quantum mechanics took us to some very strange places where the usual analogies and interpretations were useless, and there was much debate about the meaning of physical reality at the time, with Einstein, Bohr and others among the participants. At some point Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics won out (although I’m reading another book that details how Bohr was misunderstood and continue to be misunderstood even now --- more on that another time), and since that point physicists were encouraged to “shut up and calculate.” And calculate they did, and their efforts were rewarded when experiments verified the predictions of quantum electrodynamics to an absurd degree of precision, making quantum physics simultaneously the least understood and most successful theory of all time. Since then it has been quite unfashionable for physicists to ponder the nature of reality (at least in front of other physicists).

My own experience in college (both undergraduate and graduate) bears this out. Some of my friends and I wanted to know what Schrodinger’s wave function really meant, what it implied for the nature of nature. (Somehow Born’s probabilistic interpretation didn’t feel like the last word). I do not recall being taught about the different interpretations of quantum mechanics such as those of David Bohm --- I didn’t even know he’d come up with an alternate formulation until much later. We were quietly discouraged from going beyond the canonical interpretation. And to tell the truth, with assignments and tests and all, there wasn’t time to think deeply about it, so we had to content ourselves with speculative discussions over cups of chai or noodle soup. That was in Delhi University and later on I came across the same attitude in graduate school in the U.S.

So now I’m reading all kinds of interpretations and speculations on what quantum physics reveals about nature, and some of it is clearly nonsense, while the more rigorous stuff is fascinating but slow going.

But anyway one of the things I wanted to mention about Smolin’s book is that in one of the chapters he goes right out and says that that the reason why there aren’t more women or blacks in physics is “blatant prejudice.” Drawing upon his inside experience with hiring committees and the like, he reports that from what he sees, candidates are generally turned down if they are 1) female, 2) non-white and/or 3) someone inventing his or her own research program rather than following the mainstream. He notes that “whereas there have always been talented women musicians, the number of women hired by orchestras rose significantly when candidates began auditioning behind a screen.” He goes on to make analogies between the prejudice that women face in various endeavors and the resistance that new ideas face from the establishment.

The subject of why there aren’t enough women in physics is a topic for another day but it is interesting to note how clueless men seem to be about this subject (and some women too). Back in 2006 there was a report in Physics Today by researcher Evelyn Gates in which she wrote about factors affecting women going into physics. The letters from male physicists responding to her article (which does not seem to be available online) are revealing in their naivete and their assumptions about science and gender. Also well worth reading is Gates’ response at the end of the section:

http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-59/iss-12/p10.html.

Here is yet another dispatch from the land of Men Who Don’t Get It:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/03/where-want-less.html.

I want to scream.

* **

Of Motorcycles, Highways, and the Dangers of Safety

By Nancy Jane Moore

My story "Running the Road" is now available on the current edition of Farrago's Wainscot.

This is an old story; it originally appeared in a motorcycle magazine. I'm terribly fond of it -- is it as wrong for writers to admit that they have favorites among their stories as it is for parents to say they have favorites among their children?

At any rate, I'm very glad to see it in cyberprint, since it didn't exactly reach a broad audience in its initial publication.

If you want to know (or guess) the gender of the narrator or have any other reaction to the story, please feel free to post a comment.

On Reviewing, elsewhere

Other writers have been thinking about reviews, too. Check out these interesting pieces from Matt Cheney and Jeff VanderMeer:

Falling into Oblivion without a Parachute on The Mumpsimums

and Reviewing Books on Ecstatic Days.

And speaking of reviews, Julie Phillips' Kurt Vonnegut's Unpublished Writings discusses Armageddon in Retrospect.

"A Reviewer's Hardest Task"

Joanna Russ writes, in her F&SF column of January 1975 (reprinted in The Country You Have Never Seen):

A reviewer's hardest task is to define standards. "Good" can mean almost anything: what the British call "a good read," "for those who like it, this is what they'll like," "it won't poison you," "good enough for minor entertainment," "mildly pleasant," "intelligent, thoughtful, and interesting," "charming!" and just plain "good"--excluding the range of better, from fine to splendid to superb to great. Reviewers also tend to adopt a paradoxical sliding scale in measuring a book's quality, i.e., the more ambitious a book, the more it's likely to fail; yet the competent, low-level "success" can be less valuable and interesting than the flawed, fascinating, incomplete "failure." For example, in July 1973 I reviewed James Gunn's The Listeners (which belongs emphatically in category two, above) and managed to make it sound worse than Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream, a considerably lower-level (although fun and interesting) category one. Novels don't only provide different kinds of pleasures; they involve a reader more or less profoundly. Listeners was "bad" because parts of it were so wonderfully good. Dream was "good" partly because it demanded so little of the reader-- some of this by the author's deliberate choice, which only adds to the complexity of the whole business.

None of this months' hardcover novels* lives up to its author's own best work and in that sense they are not good books. They're certainly not in the "good-by-any-standards" class. Yet none of them is in the droopy-eyeball or loathsome class, either, and all have some excellences. The reviewer's business (as so many reviewers have said) is distinguishing between various levels of failure, keeping in mind that by "good" here I mean very high standards indeed.

I'm variously a reader of reviews, a writer of reviews, a writer's whose work receives reviews, and an editor/publisher who hopes to see the work she publishes reviewed. I have long read reviews for pleasure-- and not as a guide to what I ought or ought not to be reading. I think I first began reading reviews as a graduate student, most often in the form of review essays (which I also, of course, was required to write). Review essays encompass more than a simple review does, exploring the subject matter of several books in a thoughtful, critical way. This probably has something to do with my interest--as a reader--in reviews these days. When I read a review for pleasure (as I still often do), it's in the hope of being given something interesting to think about, or even the occasional gem of insight. This is certainly why I'm reading Russ's old reviews. Reviewers who offer intellectually or emotionally threadbare descriptions or assessments of the books they're reviewing don't interest me; if after several encounters I see that their reviews consistently fail to give me anything worth thinking about, I stop reading their reviews. I also stop reading their reviews for pleasure if I see that a reviewer is intractably ignorant or stupid-- that they have a penchant for misreading or under-reading or for continually praising the banal. I'm a bit like Mr. Darcy, I'm afraid, in that my good opinion of a reviewer once lost, is unlikely to be regained. I'm a busy woman, you know?

As an editor/publisher, I'm largely unconcerned with whether or not a review is pleasurably insightful or even intelligent. It's still a mystery to me what actually sells books. A reviewer's writing intelligently about a book will likely make its author happy, but it probably won't make that much difference to sales. Because I read every review of Aqueduct's books (that I know of), I'm constantly made aware of how few reviewers are careful readers. More to the point, though, is that many of those reviewers who have passed beyond the naive-reader stage are so caught up in their own particular set of dogmas that their readings tend to be inflexibly rigid and skewed to conform to their dogmas such as they are. This doesn't concern me as a publisher, but I can't help reflecting on it as a reader and writer of reviews myself.

Not surprisingly, I try to write the kind of reviews I enjoy reading. It can be hard to do it, though, when a book is so poorly written that I can barely bring myself to keep reading it. (I've twice forced myself to finish really bad books and reviewed them, but the experiences were so painful that I have a deep aversion to doing it ever again.) Russ has no hesitation in characterizing books as "bad." But aware as I am of what inadequate readers so many reviewers are, I've been reluctant to deliver such bald judgments myself. [Though so as not to mislead anyone, I will cop to once having delivered an unequivocally scathing judgment of a book that really should not have been published.] And so I have to wonder just how useful terms like "good" and "bad" can be in reviews today. Russ, unlike most reviewers, offers insight into the books she reviews; so I'm tempted to think she knows what she's talking about. Even so, for me at least it is more her discussion of the books rather than her verdict on a given book's quality that "defines" her "standards." The "whole business" is indeed complex.

___________
*The books under review were by Robert Silverberg, James Gunn, John Brunner, Philp K. Dick, and Howard Waldrop & Jake Saunders.

Lisa Tuttle's My Death

I'm pleased to announce that Aqueduct will be releasing Lisa Tuttle's My Death this summer. This creepy but feministically delicious novella will be the twenty-first volume in our Conversation Pieces series. It has previously been published in the UK, by PS Publishing, but this will be its first North American publication. Who can resist a story about an all but forgotten early twentieth-century feminist novelist who becomes the biographical subject of an early twenty-first century feminist novelist? And one who painted a watercolor she titled "My Death"? Here's an excerpt:

I gazed at the painted image of an island, a rocky island rendered loosely in shades of brown and green and gray and grayish pink. I remained unimpressed, and baffled by Alistair’s attitude towards this uninspired daub. Risky?

And then, all at once, as if another light had been switched on, I saw the hidden picture. Within the contours of the island was a woman. A woman, naked, on her back, her knees up and legs splayed open, her face hidden by a forearm flung across it and by the long hair – greenish, grayish – that flowed around her like the sea.

The center of the painting, what drew the eye and commanded the attention, was the woman’s vulva: all the life of the painting was concentrated there. A slash of pink, startling against the mossy greens and browns, seemed to touch a nerve in my own groin.

And why did she title such a painting "My Death"? I won't spoil it!

Snow in Late March in Seattle

It is, for the second time this week, snowing here on Capital Hill in Seattle, and I'm still coughing and sneezing and otherwise miserable with the Cold That Would Not Go Away. The winter, it seems endless...

In the meantime, let me toss you a few links. Kelley Eskridge sent me this one:

Labor of Love by Thomas Beatie. The transgendered Beatie, who is legally male and legally (i.e., officially) married to a woman, is pregnant and carrying a child.

Inter Press Service has an article on a report by the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS) to the United Nations Human Rights Council: "There have been “huge harassments of human rights organisations and defenders have been increasingly subject to abusive and suppressive actions by government actors… in the majority of Arab countries, particularly Egypt, Syria, Bahrain and Tunisia." The article notes:

The U.S. and other Western governments have had close ties with Arab governments in the Middle East and North Africa for many years. These ties have grown closer since the terrorist attacks on the U.S. on Sep. 11, 2001.

But since the administration of President Ronald Reagan (1981-89), promoting democracy and freedom in the Arab world has been a staple in U.S. political rhetoric. The rhetoric has ratcheted up significantly during the administration of President George W. Bush. In his second inaugural address, Bush said, “It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”


The gap between the Bush Administration's rhetoric and its actions is derisible. A letter to the Washington Post from Venezuela's Communications Minister, also published on the Commondreams.org site, by its proximity prompted me to do a bit of a compare-and-contrast exercise. Imagine, if the Bush administration held its democracy-hating allies to the standards of Venezuela... (Well no, actually, I can't imagine it ever doing that. They wouldn't be allies any longer if they did.)

And finally, the best link of all, with thanks to Josh Lukin: an excellent, intense six minutes of an interview with James Baldwin on YouTube.

Voices from Fairyland by Theodora Goss

I've been sick for the last several days: hence my silence. But now I've got some exciting news.

I'm pleased to announce that this spring Aqueduct will be publishing Voices from Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner by Theodora Goss as a volume in the Conversation Pieces series. We'll be launching this volume at WisCon in May.

The volume will include fantastical poems by Coleridge, Mew, and Warner, accompanied by four fascinating essays and several poems by Dora Goss in conversation with the Coleridge, Mew, and Warner's poems. To give you just a little taste of Voices from Fairyland, here are a few paragraphs from Dora's Introduction:

Coleridge, Mew, and Warner are only three examples of what I consider a broader phenomenon, the rest of the ice that must be present, underwater, when we see icebergs floating on a northern sea. That underwater ice is the tradition of women writing fantastical poetry. I will show you what I mean by focusing on one theme. Over and over again, women have written about witches. In "Witch-Wife," Edna St. Vincent Millay describes a woman whose "voice is a string of coloured beads, / Or steps leading into the sea" who "was not made for any man," not even the narrator, to whom she is married. The witch in Anne Sexton's "Her Kind" is fiercer and stronger. She tells us,

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.

She creates a domestic space for herself in a place that is decidedly undomestic, that is wild, feeding worms and elves rather than the children that the women who are not witches presumably feed. "A woman like that is misunderstood," Sexton tell us, and we can certainly understand why, if her voice is a string of colored beads or those mysterious steps. She must speak differently, in a language that we cannot quite understand. And here is Emily Dickinson:

Witchcraft was hung, in History,
But History and I
Find all the Witchcraft that we need
Around us, every Day—

Whatever you do, she implies, you cannot eradicate witchcraft. It is part of the world around us, always present. And we—History and Emily Dickinson—need witchcraft. I wonder what they need it for exactly, but Emily Dickinson, always her enigmatic self, does not tell us.

When People Talk about Aqueduct Books, We Listen...

Cheryl Morgan reports that she's reading the first volume of The WisCon Chronicles:

It isn’t often that I get an opportunity to talk about a book because I’m in it, but there are a couple around at the moment. The book I’m currently reading is The WisCon Chronicles, edited by Timmi Duchamp. It is a collage of material taken from WisCon 30: interviews, panel transcripts and so on. I’m in it because of a panel called (rather pretentiously) “Is Reading Feminist SF a Theory-Building Activity”. (Wiscon, for those of you who do not know, is a feminist science fiction convention.) I have to confess that I was very nervous being put on that panel and didn’t have much a clue what to say beforehand. I also think I performed better at other panels at that con. However, I wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity to be on a panel with Karen Joy Fowler, and if we really did need to talk about feminist theory I knew I could rely on my fellow panelist to do the business. As it turns out I seem to have ended up talking a lot about trans issues.

Read the rest of her post here.

And Jeff VanderMeer has this to say on Amazon.com's Omnivoracious:

L. Timmel Duchamp's The Blood in the Fruit - The latest book in the Marq'ssan Cycle might just be the best yet, part of a series that is the most important political SF published in the last decade. Praised by the likes of Cory Doctorow and Samuel Delany, Duchamp's accomplishment here is deadly, sharp, emotional, and intelligent.

A Handful of Links

I've been too busy lately to write a real post, sorry to say. But I'm still managing to do some browsing...

--The Independent reports that the British Government is attempting to "rewrite" the history of the Iraq war as it is taught in UK schools:

Britain’s biggest teachers’ union has accused the Ministry of Defence of breaking the law over a lesson plan drawn up to teach pupils about the Iraq war. The National Union of Teachers claims it breaches the 1996 Education Act, which aims to ensure all political issues are treated in a balanced way.

Teachers will threaten to boycott military involvement in schools at the union’s annual conference next weekend, claiming the lesson plan is a “propaganda” exercise and makes no mention of any civilian casualties as a result of the war.

They believe the instructions, designed for use during classroom discussions in general studies or personal, social and health education (PSE) lessons, are arguably an attempt to rewrite the history of the Iraq invasion just as the world prepares to mark its fifth anniversary.

The article notes numerous distortions and lies (including the canard about Iraq's "failure to surrender" its [nonexistent] Weapons of Mass Destruction). Read more here.

--An event called "Winter Soldier," organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War was held in Silver Springs Maryland. "Winter soldiers, according to U.S. founding father Thomas Paine, are the people who stand up for the soul of their country, even in its darkest hours." Dahr Jamail reports (for Inter Press Service) on a panel on the rules of engagement (or lack thereof) for Iraq, held on the first day of the gathering:

Garret Reppenhagen received integral training about the Geneva Conventions and the Rules of Engagement during his deployment in Kosovo. But in Iraq, “Much of this was thrown out the window,” he says.

“The men I served with are professionals,” Reppenhagen told the audience at a panel of U.S. veterans speaking of their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, “They went to Iraq to defend the U.S. But we found rapidly we were killing Iraqis in horrible ways. But we had to in order to remain safe ourselves. The war is the atrocity.”

The event, which has drawn international media attention, was organised by Iraq Veterans Against the War. It aims to show that their stories of wrongdoing in both countries were not isolated incidents limited to a few “bad apples”, as the Pentagon claims, but were everyday occurrences.

Read the whole article here.

--In the midst of the uproar over Geraldine Ferraro's remark managing to disparage both affirmative action and Obama in one mean stroke, the Inter Press Service reported that the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) based in Geneva, Switzerland released a report concluding that the US is failing to meet international standards on racial equality. The US, you see, is a signatory of an international treaty-- the 1969 Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination-- and the CERD is responsible for monitoring global compliance with the treaty:

In concluding the CERD report on U.S. record, the panel of experts called for the George W. Bush administration to take effective actions to end racist practices against minorities in the areas of criminal justice, housing, healthcare and education.

This is the second time in less than two years that the U.S. government has been found to be falling short of its treaty obligations. In March 2006, The CERD had harshly criticised the U.S. for violating Native Americans’ land rights.

Taking note of racial discrimination against indigenous communities, the Committee said it wants the U.S. to provide information about what it has done to promote the culture and traditions of American Indian, Alaska Native and indigenous Hawaiian peoples. It also urged the U.S. to apply the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The CERD also voiced strong concerns regarding environmental racism and the environmental degradation of indigenous areas of spiritual and cultural significance, without regard to whether they are on “recognised” reservation lands.

The Committee recommended to the U.S. that it consult with indigenous representatives, “chosen in accordance with their own procedures — to ensure that activities carried out in areas of spiritual and cultural significance do not have a negative impact on the enjoyment of their rights under the Convention”.

In its 13-page ruling, the U.N. body also raised serious questions about the death penalty and in the sentencing of minors to life without parole, which it linked to racial disparities between whites and blacks.

In their testimony, Bush administration officials held that the treaty obligations do not apply to laws or practices that are race-neutral on their face but discriminatory in effect. The Committee outright rejected that claim, noting that the treaty prohibits racial discrimination in all forms, including practices and legislation that may not be discriminatory in purpose, but in effect.

The gulag at Guantanamo also came in for criticism. Read the rest of the article here.

--An article in Foreign Policy in Focus by Ellen-Rae Cachola, Lizelle Festejo, Annie Fukushima, Gwyn Kirk, and Sabina Perez, Gender and US Bases in Asia-Pacific reports on the impact US bases overseas (including in Hawai'i, where the US military occupies one-fourth of the land) exercise on women's lives:

The power dynamics of militarism in the Asia-Pacific region rely on dominance and subordination. These hierarchical relationships, shaped by gender, can be seen in U.S. military exploitation of host communities, its abuse and contamination of land and water, and the exploitation of women and children through the sex industry, sexual violence, and rape. Women’s bodies, the land, and indigenous communities are all feminized, treated as dispensable and temporary. What is constructed as “civilized, white, male, western, and rational” is held superior to what is defined as “primitive, non-white, female, non-western, and irrational.” Nations and U.S. territories within the Asia-Pacific region are treated as inferiors with limited sovereignty or agency in relation to U.S. foreign policy interests that go hand-in-hand with this racist/sexist ideology.

At the end of their report, they conclude:

U.S. peace movements should not only address U.S. military involvement in the Middle East, but also in other parts of the world. Communities in the Asia-Pacific region have a long history of contesting U.S. militarism and offer eloquent testimonies to the negative impact of U.S. military operations there. These stories provide insights into the gendered dynamics of U.S. foreign and military policy, and the complicity of allied nations in this effort. Many individuals and organizations are crying out for justice, united by threads of hope and visions for a different future. Our job is to listen to them and to act accordingly.

The current elections in the US will have no impact whatsoever on the problem, of course.

--And finally, Carmen Boullosa's Garden of Monsters offers a fascinating review of Chilean novelist Roberto Bolano's Nazi Literature in the Americas. Since her piece delivers a delicious punchline, I won't spoil it by saying anything more.

Lambda Literary Awards Finalists

I'll confine myself to reporting on only two of the award's numerous categories and simply note that Samuel R. Delany's Dark Reflections is a finalist in the "Men's Fiction" category. The full list can be found here.

LGBT SCI-FI/FANTASY/HORROR

• Wicked Gentlemen, Ginn Hale (Blind Eye Books)
• A Companion to Wolves, Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear (Tor Books)
• Spaceman Blues: A Love Song, Brian Francis Slattery (Tor Books)
• The Dust of Wonderland, Lee Thomas (Alyson Books)
• Ha'penny, Jo Walton (Tor Books)

WOMEN'S MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY

• Comfort Food for Breakups, Marusya Bocurkiuw (Arsenal Pulp Press)
• And Now We Are Going to Have a Party, Nicola Griffith (Payseur & Schmidt)
• An Army of Ex-Lovers, Amy Hoffman (University of Massachusetts Press)
• Two Lives: Gertrude & Alice, Janet Malcolm (Yale University Press)
• Waiting for the Call, Jaqueline Taylor (University of Michigan Press)

International Women's Day

Today is International Women's Day. I think it must be almost twenty years since I last celebrated it. I recall marches through the streets of downtown Seattle with a few thousand other women and forums and lectures and maybe even a film series or two. I thought of all this the other day when my eye happened to light on a bit of memorabilia that's been hanging on the wall (or, for awhile, the door) of my office for the last twenty years. My old friend and comrade in activism, Therese Spaude, made it for me; and yesterday, when I took it down from the wall, I found written on the back of it "Happy International Women's Day" (plus a few personal words). To make it, she photocopied a photo and inscribed the photocopy with tempera. I've scanned it, and as you can see, it's gotten a bit yellow with age and still, for some reason, retains the creases it acquired during its brief sojourn in an envelope that Therese taped to my back door one March day in the late 1980s.

Another Link

Liz Henry's Enough Reality! I've Got the Space Bug at the Feminist SF Blog discusses her recent reading, viz., Wen Spencer's Endless Blue, Maureen McHugh's Mission Child, my own Blood in the Fruit, Naomi Mitchison's Solution Three, Elizabeth Bear's Dust, and Karl Schroeder's Permanence (which she classifies as "Dudely SF that pisses me off").

Naturally my attention zoomed right in on her discussion of the Marq'ssan Cycle in general and Blood in the Fruit in particular. Here's a chunk of it:

Throughout the Marq’ssan series I have been more and more impressed with Duchamp’s skill at unpacking the infinite detail, the fractalness of thought, in human relationships, laid bare so relentlessly it feels like seeing another sort of interrogation — of the characters — and thus we can’t avoid interrogating and examining our own lives and relationships in similar ways. I know that some people will pick up Alanya to Alanya and won’t get it. But if you are the sort of science fiction reader who likes Middlemarch and books like that… You will be well rewarded by plowing through all the Marq’ssan books though I fear for most people it will take till the middle of book 2 to get really hooked. Then once you are hooked, watch out. It’s painful and scary. Talk about axe for the frozen sea. These are books that leave you staring at the ceiling for several nights or violently sobbing as you reevaluate bits of your life and think of all your failings and self-lies, denials and blindnesses and hypocrisies. I don’t think I’ve read anything that so well entangles that personal detail and complexity with political complexity, other than The Orphan’s Tales, which is a completely different flavor of story. How do people make moral decisions? What makes them tick? What is evil? Why is our society so gendered? What the hell? Can people of different social classes, or genders, ever really trust or believe each other? What truth is even possible? Can non violent revolution succeed, and how would we measure its success, and while we’re at it let’s think more carefully about what we mean by violence… Who is fighting what, and why, and how, and what result might it have? ZOMG. Like that.

Wow. My cup runneth over.

Wednesday Links

Richard Larson reviews Vandana Singh's Of Love and Other Monsters at Strange Horizons. In his review he observes:

Singh is successful in her assertion that we are all alienated from each other and that none of us can really know anyone else, at least not in the way that we come to understand that Arun's people—other aliens—can understand each other, using a "language" involving an intimate conjoining of minds. Arun agonizes over his predicament with Sankaran—("How does a man who is not a man or a woman, not a human or an alien—how does such a being confess his love to another man?" [p. 52])—which is a love that will ultimately elude him and which will come, in the narrative, to represent the tragic inability of humans to ever truly connect with one another.

On a completely different front, Carlos Martinez reminds us that the US-powered and -directed "Plan Columbia" has been interfering with Ecuadoran sovereignty for years, for instance by spraying toxic chemicals on its crops, animals, and human populations; which is to say, Ecuador has much to resent from its bully of a neighbor. (And I can't help but note that Columbia is merely following the US's example in refusing to respect the national borders of other countries. Can it be any wonder that that so many of the US's allies feel free to violate other countries' national borders as though it were their right to do so?) Martinez notes the typically antihistorical and skewed reporting on the situation by the US media:

While some press in the United States question whether Chavez is using this situation as an opportunity to distract Venezuelans from their social problems, this excessive focus on him is in fact distracting people in the US from having a much needed dialogue on their own government’s role in fomenting this so-called “Andean Crisis.” As a result, the tough realities and repercussions from the US government’s support for a military solution in Colombia are being overlooked. Emboldened and armed with the multibillion dollar support of Plan Colombia, the Uribe government has decided to violate international law rather than attempting mediated discussions with the FARC. This is simply the latest controversy to discredit Colombia, already renowned for having the greatest number of human rights violations and politically motivated murders per year in the Western Hemisphere.

Indeed. But human rights violations do not now and never have mattered to the US media (or Government)-- except, of course, when committed by designated enemies of the US Government.

In the Realm of Political Fantasy

The United Nations is currently engaged in two-week long discussion on the status of women worldwide. Thalif Deen, writing for Inter Press Service, notes that "peacemaking is still largely in the hands of men in suits, puffing on cigars." She cites the example of the ongoing peace talks in Darafur, where women and children are the most victimized, talks that nevertheless lack a "gender adviser." Getting women’s voices heard in the conference rooms would be a start, Gina Torry, coordinator of the non-governmental Working Group on Women, Peace and Security, says “but getting them to (positions of authority at the negotiating) table will show real progress.” The latter, however, "is still mostly in the realm of political fantasy, says the U.N. Fund for the Development of Women (UNIFEM)."

Deen observes:

A Security Council resolution (1325) adopted in 2000 called for equal participation by both men and women in maintaining and promoting peace and security. But that resolution “was a long way from being adequately implemented”, says Anne Marie Goetz, UNIFEM’s chief adviser on Governance, Peace and Security.

She told the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women — which concludes its two-week session Friday — that very few women participated in peace talks as official negotiators or observers.

“Disarmament, demobilisation and re-integration processes still rarely addressed the needs of women associated with fighting forces, and post-conflict planning and financing for women’s recovery, remained weak,” she added.

Goetz called for a gender-sensitive perspective on conflict resolution, peacemaking and rehabilitation.

On the positive side, UNIFEM has recently supported capacity-building of women’s groups in Darfur and national peace consultations with women, while facilitating women’s access to institutions involved in the peace process.

In northern Uganda, UNIFEM has joined hands with the Department of Political Affairs to appoint a gender adviser to the peace talks. At the same time, it has supported efforts to improve military and police tactics to prevent sexual gender-based violence in conflicts.

Assistant Secretary-General Carolyn McAskie, head of the U.N. Peacebuilding Support Office, points out that despite much rhetoric about women’s roles in peacebuilding, women’s contributions had rarely been fully recognised.

But both her office and UNIFEM have actively promoted women’s groups to participate in the peacebuilding processes in two countries: Sierra Leone and Burundi.

The government of Sierra Leone and the U.N. Peacebuilding Commission have adopted a Peacebuilding Cooperation Framework that recognises gender equality as a cross-cutting peacebuilding issue with specific commitments to advance that goal.

These commitments include family support units, capacity-building of national gender institutions and implementing laws relating to domestic violence, inheritance and property rights.

In Burundi, McAskie said, women have participated in the peace process, integrating gender equality into democratic governance and the peacebuilding framework.

As a result of quotas spelled out in the peace agreement and Burundi’s new constitution, women were now better represented in government, holding 30 percent of parliamentary seats and seven ministerial posts.

“Despite those significant achievements, much more must be done,” McAskie told the Commission on the Status of Women last week.

“We have learned that our ability to affect real change in gender equality through peacebuilding greatly depends on how the international community establishes its priorities and uses its resources,” she declared.

Read the complete article here.